


musica universalis

by vapiddreamscape



Series: The Fairytale Project [10]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, Greek Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 10:02:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10554454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vapiddreamscape/pseuds/vapiddreamscape
Summary: Trapped in a ship drifting through space, Icarus learns about heroes and songs ringing through the silence of the stars.





	

_For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. -Vincent Van Gogh_

* * *

Most of the books he’s read say space is silent, and after years spent drifting through a slog of vacuum and stars, Icarus is inclined to agree. But at some point, that silence must have leaked in through the airlocks because for as long as he can remember, he and his father have orbited each other without words, proximity pulling them together while some other, unnamed charge threatens to pull them apart. The space that lies between them is a yawning expanse of nothing, reflective of the black stretching out from their portholes. He’s surprised he ever learned to speak, given the circumstances.

His father locks himself in his laboratory for days at a time, barely touching the protein packs Icarus shoves under his door three times a solar. (It isn’t until he’s balancing on the precipice of adulthood that Icarus discovers he was crafting the means of their escape.) Until such time, there is a boy growing into sullen adolescence in silence, with nothing but the books their king and captor so graciously gifted to them before he launched them into space and took away the key.

Most of them are stories of heroes slain by monsters, a taunt from the man who put them here. _Look what happens to people like you who cross people like me._ But, at the same time their blood is spilled from the sword, their souls are scattered across the stars. Somehow, they are immortalized forever in the points of light studded across the black he knows so well.

And, apparently, they sing.

He doesn’t quite understand everything these books are saying. Unlike his father, the more esoteric ideas of science and mathematics slip through his fingers in favor of the bedtime stories he had to tell himself.People tell tale time and time again of the music. From what he can comprehend from fragmented pages that threaten to crumble beneath his fingerips, twined in the angles between every star and planet are harmonies that should be cacophonous given the sheer vastness of the cosmos.

Music shouldn’t exist within in the vacuum of space; but then again, neither should little boys, and they both are. He wonders if the stars sing of the things they have seen slinging their lights millions of lightyears away or ballads of the heroes that swell their ranks, or things he can’t imagine after a life imprisoned the _SS Labyrinth_.

One day, with metal wings powering him into the world he has only ever watched from afar, Icarus will hear the music of the stars. It will be silence and for once in his goddamn life, that silence will be beautiful. Then, he will become a part of it.


End file.
